Aliens: Colonial Marines delayed until autumn

Developer Gearbox has confirmed that long gestating movie tie-in Aliens: Colonial Marines will not now be out this spring, but has instead slipped back to the autumn.

Aliens: Colonial Marines – not game over yet, man

Billed as the official sequel to the 1986 sci-fi classic, Colonial Marines has never had an official release date, but it was expected to be out sometime in the next couple of months. But yesterday the official website changed the date to autumn, and then mysteriously changed it back again to spring.

Sega and Gearbox then switched stories again and confirmed the autumn release date to website Game Informer : ‘Aliens: Colonial Marines is a process of creativity and invention and those don’t necessarily follow the structure of an assembly line.

‘While setting clear goals, deadlines and predictions is helpful, they are often subjective. We don’t want to sacrifice the creative process just for the sake of following a blue print. We prefer to have the creative discovery shape that blue print because our goal is to make a great game, and we are prioritising this goal over the previously targeted date.’What exactly is going on is hard to say, as despite being in development for at least three years the game has had only a couple of previews in public and no hands-on. It looked good at E3 and Gamescom when we saw it, but unfortunately now is probably the worst time to release an Aliens-related game in the last 26 years.Thanks to Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, which is billed as a quasi-prequel to Alien, this is the first time since the early ’80s that fan interest has been focused more on the original film in the series rather than the more action-orientated sequel.Prometheus is due out in June, so it’s possible Colonial Marines is being delayed to include some reference to it. It’s also possible that the game just isn’t ready and this is an ordinary delay. We just hope that whatever’s going on the game doesn’t get lost in the inevitable Christmas rushâ¦